The Characterization of Reflection by Student Teachers Using the Critical Incident Technique

Barbara R. Peterson
Austin Peay University

Introduction

“Reflection is when you examine your own strengths and weaknesses.”
                                                                                               …Matt
“Reflection is a critical component in gaining the most out of your experience.”
                                                                                               …Clare
“Reflection is looking at a lesson taught, problem in the class with a student or an issue of concern.”
                                                                                               …Kim

     This study is about different ways of reflecting and thinking about teaching.  Matt, Clare and Kim, each defined reflection from their personal experiences and beliefs.  Ultimately, their beliefs about reflection will guide them in making meaning of their teaching practice.  Matt and Clare describe personal growth as a basic construct.  The students in Matt’s and Clare’s classrooms appear to be marginal.  Kim, on the other hand, sees a link between herself and her students.  These different perspectives prompt Matt, Clare and Kim to approach their practice differently.  My interpretation of their stories and those of their peers has resulted in a better understanding of the nature of reflection for preservice teachers.
Background
     Research on teaching and learning has grown tremendously during the past twenty years. The literature in teacher education including the literature on teacher development, professional development and effective classroom teaching is rich with references on the importance of promoting quality teaching through reflective practice (Freppon, 2001; Loughran, 1996; McIntyre & Byrd, 2000; Reagan, Case & Brubacher, 2000; Schon, 1983, 1987).   The concept of reflection was a significant construct in defining professional practice in Donald Schon’s work on Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1987).  Schon identifies two types of reflection, these are reflection-in-action (thinking on your feet) and reflection-on-action (retrospective thinking)..  Also, policy makers at state and national levels highlight the concept of reflection in every recommendation as a tool for the improvement of teaching and teacher preparation.
     As a teacher educator, I have often asked my students to reflect on their field or clinical experience. In doing so, I believed I was presenting acceptable opportunities to reflect by providing guided questions for journal writing, having students reflect on a video taped lesson, and more recently by having students write supporting statements for artifacts submitted in their portfolios. Initially, I was content knowing that opportunities for reflection were built into my syllabus. I assumed the act of reflection itself was sufficient to promote understanding.  However, when reading their reflections, I noticed students’ descriptions varied greatly in what was being reflected upon.  While I noticed that some were able to reflect deeply on their practice, I observed that most were not.  I was conscious of the value of reflection to promote understanding, but I was frustrated at not having the tools to help my students become better at reflecting more critically on their practice and experiences. Reagan, Case and Brubacher (2000) addressed the issue of reflection in teacher education and claim that reflection as a concept is not formally facilitated in many teacher education programs and it is taken for granted that all teacher candidates reflect in a similar manner.  Their assertion resonated with my own experiences, and I realized we cannot assume all student teachers will reflect in the same way with the same results.
Nature of Reflective Practice
     Reflective thinking and reflective practice have become common concepts in the teacher education literature as national and state policy makers and teacher education programs have committed themselves to preparing teachers who are reflective practitioners (Cochran-Smith, 2006; Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2006; Martinez & MacKay 2002; Ostorga, 2002-2003; Yost, Sentner, & Forlenza-Bailey, 2000). 
     At the heart of the conception of reflective practice is the work of John Dewey, who wrote about the need for reflective thinking as early as 1903 and dealt with the role of reflection extensively in How We Think (1910, revised 1933).  For Dewey, logical analysis was basically the generalization (in a systematic form) of the reflective process in which all of us engage on occasion.  Dewey recognized that we can “reflect” on a whole host of things in the sense of merely “thinking about” them; however, logical or analytic reflection can take place only when there is a real problem to be solved. 
     Dewey saw true reflective practice as taking place only when the individual faces a real problem that he or she needs to resolve and then seeks to resolve that problem in a rational manner. According to Dewey (1933), reflection begins with a “felt difficulty” (p. 102) which can range in intensity from mild uneasiness to intense shock. To address this sense of unease, Dewey suggests, individuals must proceed through three steps of reflection: 1) problem definition; 2) means/ends analysis; and 3) generalization.  Dewey distinguishes between action based on reflection and action that is impulsive or blind, and his emphasis is on the need to develop certain attitudes of open-mindedness and skills of thinking and reasoning in order to reflect. For Dewey, a fundamental purpose of education is to help people acquire habits of reflection so they can engage in intelligent action.
     Recent emphasis on the need for reflective practice in education has been largely inspired by the work of Donald Schon.  Schon (1987) suggests that the ability to reflect on one’s actions is characteristic of professional practice.  Schon stresses that reflective practice is grounded in the practitioner’s appreciation system (i.e., repertoire of values, knowledge, theories, and practices).  The appreciation system of the teacher influences the types of dilemmas that will be recognized, the way teachers frame and reframe dilemmas, and the judgments teachers make about the desirability of solutions.  For example, Valli (1990) and Zeichner & Tabachnick (2001), note that teachers must use moral as well as educational criteria in examining the consequence of implemented solutions.  Consequently, preparation of reflective practitioners requires teaching not only the elements of the reflective process but also increasing the range and depth of knowledge in each student’s appreciation system.
     VanManen (1977) and Valli (1993) propose that reflective thinking occurs in stages (VanManen, 1977) or that there are levels of reflection (Valli, 1993).  After reviewing the literature on teacher reflection and different teacher education programs that emphasize reflective teaching, Valli’s (1993) research led her to propose a model of reflection consisting of five orientations: technical reflection, reflection-in and on-action, deliberative reflection, personalistic reflection and critical reflection.
     Valli (1993) describes a technical orientation to teaching as being on performance, often measurable performance, with the teacher’s role limited to ‘piloting’ students through a learning process conceived and designed by others.  Valli (1993) adds that technical teachers would have little basis upon which to make strategic decisions or to consider consequences or alternative courses of action.  These technical teachers would simply have a repertoire of behaviors which are used in a relatively unvarying manner. Valli further asserts that teachers who utilize technical reflection are externally motivated and judge their performance through definitions of good teaching by an outside expert. 
    Valli borrows the terms reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action from Donald Schon (1983, 1987).  Reflection-on-action refers to the retrospective thinking teachers do after a lesson has been taught.  Reflection-in-action refers to the spontaneous, intuitive decisions made during the act of teaching. Unlike technical reflection, in reflection-in and on-action the teacher’s voice is regarded as expert and the content for reflection comes from the teacher’s own unique situation.
    A third type of reflection proposed by Valli is deliberative reflection. Valli views deliberative reflection as emphasizing decision making based on a variety of sources: research, experience, the advice of other teachers, and personal beliefs and values. According to Valli, no one voice dominates.  Multiple voices and perspectives are sought and heard.
    Personalistic reflection focuses on personal growth and relationships.  In this mode of reflection, teachers would consciously link their personal and professional lives. They also would think about their students’ lives.  Valli states that teachers who reflect in a personalistic way would be caretakers, not just information dispensers.  These teachers would reflect to understand the reality of their students in order to give them the best care possible.
     The final type of reflection suggested by Valli is critical reflection. The aim of critical reflection is not just understanding, but improving the quality of life of disadvantaged groups. This mode of reflection is derived from political philosophers and is the only form of reflection that explicitly views the school and school knowledge as political constructions. Teachers engaged in critical reflection would attend to the voices of those who are among a society’s least powerful and privileged.
Purpose of the Study
     This study attempted to discover new information about how student teachers conceptualize and engage in reflection through the use of the critical incident technique.  Researching a cognitive process such as reflective activity required that I capture a point of view.  Consequently, this study incorporates perspectives from phenomenology and the critical incident technique in designing this study.
     This study also in concerned with a theory of action (Schon, 1983, 1987) and the way in which action, and in this case the action of reflection, was interpreted and made meaningful by the study’s participants.
     Insight derived from the descriptions of a teaching/learning incident and the reflections on that incident required the examination of the lived experience from a phenomenological perspective.  What was discovered was the experience of individuals through their own words.  The method chosen to elicit qualitative data in this study, the critical incident technique, was selected for its utility in determining the essential requirements of an activity.
Critical Incidents
     The Critical Incident Technique grew out of studies by John Flanagan and his colleagues in the Aviation Psychology Program of the United States Army Air Force in World War II. Flanagan (1954) defines an incident as “…any observable human activity that is sufficiently complete in itself to permit inferences and predictions to be made about the person performing the act” (p. 327).  To be critical, Flanagan contends an incident must occur in a situation where the purpose or intent of the act seems fairly clear to the observer and “where its consequences are sufficiently definite to leave little doubt to concerning its effects” (p. 327). A major advantage to the use of the Critical Incident Technique is the fact that the critical incident focuses on actual behaviors in which the purpose and consequences of the behaviors are clear.
     Lorette Woolsey (1986) indicates that the critical incident technique is an exploratory qualitative method of research that has been shown to be both reliable and valid in generating a comprehensive and detailed description of a content domain.  Woolsey asserts the critical incident technique basically consists of asking eyewitness observers for factual accounts of behaviors (their own or others’) that significantly contribute to a specified outcome.  The emphasis is on incidents (things which actually happened and were directly observed) that are critical (things which significantly affected the outcome). Thuynsma (2001) suggests a critical incident is an incident, or turning point, that results in changes in the observer’s perceptions of effectiveness or success.
Participants
     The participants in this study comprised a small group of student teachers in an Elementary Education program at a Midwestern state university.  All participants were in the final weeks of a sixteen-week clinical teaching experience.
Data Collection
     Data was gathered at the end of each of three clinical teaching semesters.  Interviews, sometimes at school sites, were planned.  The primary means of data collection were audio taped (and transcribed verbatim), semi-structured interviews that lasted from one hour to one and a half hours. Interviews focused on participants’ description of a critical incident in teaching.  The interviews were constructed to elicit various dimensions of student teachers’ reflection of the incident, and focused on their own thinking processes in regard to the incident.
Discussion of the Findings
     Most of the participants utilized several types and levels of reflection when describing the dilemma inherent in their critical incident, while some demonstrated a limited use of various levels of reflection.
The Nature of Critical Incidents Described by Student Teachers
     My initial impression on reading the transcribed interviews of the critical incidents was that the dilemmas described by the participants focused on two basic concerns.  One concern involved issues of classroom management and teacher control, and the other concern involved issues of planning. This was not surprising in light of the literature on learning to teach.  For new and beginning teachers, classroom management is cited as being most problematic (Berliner, 1988).   Clearly it was what “went wrong” which concerned the participants the most.   
     All participants in this study described a teaching incident that became critical in the way in which it was analyzed.  All the critical incidents described by the participants created a sense of disequilibrium or disorientation in the participants.  This disequilibrium was reported as a dilemma and challenged the participants to raise questions about the nature of their experience and/or their personal beliefs. The dilemmas were disorienting dilemmas of the kind that Mezirow (1990) suggests are a necessary pre-condition for critical self-examination. This can be seen in the incident described by participant #5 who suddenly realized he “wasn’t cut out to teach second grade.”  As he reflected on the incident, he determined two courses of action, one personal and one professional.  The personal course of action was to develop a long-term goal of not teaching at a grade level as low as second grade. Once that determination was made, the participant quickly turned his attention to his students.  Even though he knew he did not want to teach second grade, he had a moral responsibility to ensure that his students learned. His comment demonstrates his belief in his role as a teacher.

I guess I decided that I’m two-thirds of the way through, but I still have a third of the way to go.  I’m not just going to throw in the towel and say I can’t do this.  I am able to do it.  You know I have to be able to do it because that’s what part of what being a teacher is you know I have to be able to pull it off.  So the more immediate consequence would be a change in the way that I was teaching, more specifically perhaps the way that I was planning.

     Through reflection, some students were able to come to resolution and articulate their rationale concerning the resolution. However, what was of greater interest was the difference in the nature of their reflections. In particular there was a considerable difference between those students who resolved their dilemmas and those who did not. Those students who resolved their dilemmas or who came close to resolving their dilemmas were more apt to draw from their prior beliefs and construct new knowledge. Those participants who did not resolve their dilemma were less apt to make reference to their prior beliefs. These students looked to the beliefs of others to provide knowledge. How participants analyzed the dilemmas they perceived in their critical incidents, the implicit knowledge and beliefs systems they brought to the analysis and the process by which they engaged in reflection affected the type and level of reflection in which they engaged.
How Student Teachers Reflect on a Critical Incident
     Analysis of the data revealed that several students engaged in multiple types of reflection to resolve dilemmas.  Technical reflection was dominant.  This was not surprising and supports the literature on learning to teach (Valli, 1997; Zeichner & Tabachnick, 2001). Technical reflection sees the practitioner examining the technical aspects of practice and listening to the voices of more knowledgeable others.
     The participants often used other types of reflection in addition to technical reflection.  Personalistic reflection and critical reflection were also commonly used.  In this case “critical” is used in its most general sense.  In the literature, critical reflection is often referred to as looking at the social and political influences of teacher decision making to enact school wide change (e.g., Van Manen,1977). Participants did not engage in critical reflection in Van Manen’s sense, but did in Mezirow’s sense. Mezirow (1990, 1998) suggests that critical reflection involves looking at the influence of personal beliefs to enact change for personal/professional growth. 
     Personalistic reflection recognizes the connections teachers make with students in order to facilitate learning. The participants who were committed to their personal beliefs tended to use personalistic and critical reflection more than participants who listened to the voice of authority only. Additionally, participants who listened to their own voices or sought multiple perspectives also engaged in a wider range of reflective activities to find resolution to their dilemmas. Reflection-in-Action and Reflection-for-Action were also common types of reflection for participants as they engaged in ways to make sense of their particular situation.
     Deliberative reflection was the least common type of reflection to be used by the participants. Feedback and support by others is valued in deliberative reflection, and one voice does not stand above others as authority. Only two participants engaged in deliberative reflection and collaborated with other professionals to resolve their dilemma. Reluctance to seek assistance in the reflective process might be seen as an effect of “cultural myth” where the teacher is seen  as an autonomous professional who is a self-sufficient expert.   To seek assistance would be to admit that one failed to fulfill this image, or cultural myth, of a “good” teacher (Britzman, 1991).  In describing deliberative reflection, Valli (1997) does not cast this type of reflection in terms of reliance on external authority, but rather as a collaborative process by which an individual’s thinking and internal motivation can be expanded by the ideas of others.
     Five of the seven participants were internally motivated toward resolution and took the necessary risks to accomplish their goal.  For example, participant #6 employed a teaching strategy that was not how his teacher taught, and participant #2 was internally motivated to help his students become better citizens.  All internally motivated participants utilized many types of reflection strategies to resolve their teaching dilemma. The two participants who did not demonstrate internal motivation, but instead listened to the voice of authority, were not as successful as the internally motivated participants in resolving their dilemma. These two participants did not utilize multiple strategies of reflection to resolve the dilemma they described. They remained focused on the technical aspects of their reported incident. They also did not take ownership over the resolution of the dilemma and looked to an outside authority to provide answers, help and support.  Their teaching identity appeared to remain static. Participants who utilized multiple strategies for reflection experienced a shift in their identity as teachers and either felt more empowered (participants #1 & #7) or transformed (participants #5 & #6). The question this raises for teacher educators is do student teachers, who are internally motivated, reflect more critically than student teachers who are externally motivated? The problem for teacher educators is one of helping student teachers develop dispositions and capabilities to see the connections between the dilemmas inherent in life in the classroom (technical and practical) and the implicit knowledge (Murphy, 2004) they bring to teaching so that they can transform both their conceptions of “good” teaching and their professional practice.
Conclusions
     Results of this study suggest that student teachers utilize multiple types of reflection when resolving teaching dilemmas. From this perspective, technical issues are not transcended, but become linked to considerations of broader perspectives of educational goals.  This study rejects the view that somehow types and levels of reflection are separate and act independently of each other. 
     In addition, this study contradicts the notion that learning to teach is an additive process that bypasses the context of the teaching experience. All the participants in this study were challenged by an incident that manifested through the interactive dynamics of the classroom. Likewise, all participants focused on issues of external concern while simultaneously drawing from their implicit beliefs of good teaching. And, all but two participants reported an impact to their personally held beliefs. For two participants the impact was transformative.  In other words, their beliefs were challenged to the extent that the participants reconsidered their prior beliefs and transformed their practice in light of new understandings through reflection.  This was seen when both participants #5 & #6 changed the way in which they approached their teaching.  Participant #5 made the most striking change by looking at his teaching through the eyes of his students. When he assessed his students’ learning needs, he adjusted his methods of instruction to more adequately meet those needs. Being student centered was a radical shift in the way in which this participant conceptualized his teaching. Based on this finding, this study suggests that teacher candidates can construct new knowledge about teaching when faced with teaching dilemmas that challenge their implicit beliefs.
     The study does not suggest that student teachers should change their beliefs, but rather points to the need to focus more closely on what beginning teachers already know and believe about teaching. By bringing implicit beliefs (Murphy, 2004) about teaching forward and rendering them explicit, may help student teachers engage in more purposeful professional judgments. The strategy of the Critical Incident Technique may make it possible for beginning teachers to confront their own notions of teaching and learning as a beginning step in learning how to teach. This method allows teacher educators to seek to engage beginning teachers in a process (Wideen, et.al., 1998) as opposed to providing them with the knowledge they require.
     For most of this study’s participants, the critical incident brought into focus a “gap” between their professional identity as revealed in the incident and their desired identity—the image of the “good” teacher implicit in their belief systems and reinforced by “cultural myths” (Britzman, 1991).  Whether this perceived gap led to transformation depended on the level of reflection in which the participants engaged.  Participant #3 saw no dilemma/gap in herself—the rule was wrong.  Participant #4 was “rescued” so did not face consequences that might have led to critical/transformative reflection.  Yet other participants described their critical incident as initiating transformation of their beliefs and orienting them to new understandings about teaching or themselves. Moving from one orientation to another is usually experienced as a transition between two worlds—as a shift from one reality to another (Van Manen, 1977).  Van Manen uses the term “co-orientational grasping” to refer to the situation in which one person partakes in the orientation of another. “Thus, co-orientational grasping is built into the teacher-learner relationship” (Van Manen, 1977, p. 213). An examination of the critical incidents reported by the participants revealed that all but one of the participants reported entering their students’ realm of reality to improve instruction.  Through reflection, no participant’s conceptions of themselves as teachers remained untouched.
     A connection was seen among the participants’ reflections, prior experience and belief systems, and the “cultural myths” implicit in those belief systems, that points to the need to connect reflection to teacher identity formation.   In making conceptions of the “good teacher” explicit throughout teacher preparation programs—in discussions in methods courses and pre-student teaching clinical/field experiences, as well as in the student teaching experience—cultural myths can be examined and challenged.
     Deliberative reflection can be enhanced by providing focused opportunities for student teachers to engage in purposeful discussions with their mentor teachers and university mentors in regard to teaching dilemmas.  Peer dialogue could also afford candidates the opportunity to engage in deliberative reflection while developing the habit of collegial dialogue.
Interview Protocol Guided Questions

1. Critical Incident in Teaching
2. Give a brief description of a teaching/learning incident youexperienced recently.  This could be something you observed orsomething you participated in.
3. What were the consequences (effects or outcomes) of this event?
4. Did an educational dilemma exist?  If so, describe it.
5. Is this incident significant enough for you to reinforce it?  Why/Why not?
6. What, if anything, would you have done differently?  Why?
7. What do you expect the students learned from this event?
8. What did you learn from this event?
9. What further thoughts or questions were generated from this event?
10. What in your training helped you respond to the critical incident?
11. What is reflection?

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